Threat E-Mail Hits Shuswap Netizens

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) has issued an alert to the residents of Shuswap (British Columbia, Canada) that a fake e-mail is circulating online while targeting the inboxes of people in the region.

The fraudulent message, in a bid to blackmail its reader, threatens to take away his life.

State Police, the sender of the e-mail is a so-called killer man who apparently has been hired to take recipient's lives. The message suggests that its reader must wire a good sum of money for evading death, according to Police. Globaltvbc.com published this on June 9, 2010.

Meanwhile, as per security researchers, the Shuswap incident appears very much similar to "spear" phishing in which fraudsters aim to scam one particular category of people. In other words, these assaults represent targeted assaults, skillfully tailored for striking inhabitants of one specific location.

In the meantime, RCMP, following the Shuswap event, has advised residents to ignore the scam message and not reply to it in any manner whatsoever.

State investigating officials and security experts, who had been tracking threat e-mails for quite some time, the current type of scam e-mails most likely have their source in Moscow, Russia. The lot of grammatical errors in them suggests their writers are non-English speaking individuals. Also, the addresses to which these e-mails are being sent have been culled from commercially natured databases, meaning these are aiming at people who apparently are equipped to meet extortionists' demands.

Still, recipients need not be scared, as the threat e-mails are mass-mailed rather than sent to specific persons. For instance, the e-mail scam hitting Shuswap covers almost everyone in the region.

Additionally, the security experts and investigating officials highlight that these fake messages seem to be international in nature. E-mail users from Queensland, Australia, to Jacksonville, Florida, too have been receiving such threat e-mails at one or the other time.

Finally, the scam involving an alleged Hit-man appears to re-emerge in Canada, since in May 2010, Durham Regional Police had alerted residents of this type of e-mail fraud. That Hit-man scam e-mail targeted inboxes belonging to people in Greater Toronto and Edmonton.

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» SPAMfighter News - 6/18/2010